Israel Matzav

IDF Chief of Staff: "Disengagement impaired security"

Each of the three Israeli newspapers with an English language web site has an interview with IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz today in honor of Independence Day. None of them has the headline I put at the top of this post. The Jerusalem Post says "Halutz: 'The world can stop Iran'" HaAretz says "Halutz: IDF reoccupation of Gaza won't end rocket fire" and YNet says "Halutz: No confrontation with Hamas in near future." But if you read between the lines, my headline is the correct one.

The Post quotes Halutz as saying:

"I am not pushing for the occupation of Gaza," he said, "I am pushing in the opposite direction. ... I can't recall that in all the years of fighting when we were there that we succeeded in reducing the firing of Kassams to zero."

The price Israel would pay for re-entering the Gaza Strip would be much greater than any success in stopping the Kassams, Halutz said.

This is complete and utter nonsense. The first Kassam fired in or from Gaza was fired in 2002. According to another source it was fired in 2001. The first time an Israeli city was hit was on March 5, 2002, when two rockets struck Sderot. The first kill from a Qassam occurred on June 28, 2004. And there is no question that Kassam fire on the Negev area surrounding the Gaza Strip has increased since the disengagement surrender from Gaza. The Wikipedia entry linked above shows six 'notable' Kassam attacks before the Gaza surrender and nine in the nine months since the Gaza surrender. What Halutz is really saying is, "we can't go back into Gaza. It would cost us too many casualties."

Similarly, HaAretz quotes Halutz as saying:

"We were in Gaza for 38 years. In all the years of fighting in Gaza, we never managed to cut the number of Qassams to zero," said Halutz in an Independence Day interview to Haaretz.

"There is one school of thought in the defense establishment that argues that we need to reenter Gaza to curtail the Qassams. I oppose this. The army is not the main advocate of this approach. Others within the defense establishment are touting it. They believe that this is the only solution to the Qassams, and they fail to understand the price that this would entail."

...

"I think it would be futile to reenter Gaza at this point if we don't want to find ourselves back in the quagmire," he added.

That said, Halutz is in favor of declaring the Palestinian Authority an enemy and attacking from a distance targets identified as belonging to Hamas.

Halutz also rejects claims that the disengagement from Gaza harmed Israeli security and lead to Hamas' rise to power.

"The question is what you count. In terms of the dry statistics of casualties, it can be said that our security situation in Gaza has been changed entirely for the better. Since the withdrawal there has been no one killed on the Israeli side as a result of terror from the Gaza Strip. This is no small matter compared to dozens of people killed every a year in past. People are counting rockets, but before the disengagement thousands of mortars were fired, which hit Gush Katif."

"I don't think that Hamas came into power because of the disengagement," he added. "The elections, after all, were supposed to have been held in July 2005. Hamas would have received the same result then, perhaps a bit less."

This is disingenuous. Regarding the 'Israeli side,' it's also incorrect. Of course, no Israelis have been killed in the Gaza Strip; none are there. Halutz's claim that no one on the Israeli side has been killed since the disengagement as a result of terror from the Gaza Strip is incorrect. People have been killed and people have been injured. The fact that no Jews were killed is simply a matter of luck:

On September 24, 2005, five Israelis were injured when Palestinian terrorists launched about 30 rockets on Israeli communities from the Gaza Strip.

February 3, 2006, a Qassam rocket struck a family's house in the western Negev village of Kibbutz Karmiya, moderately injuring four people, icluding a 7-month-old baby.

On March 28, 2006, in a direct hit, a Qassam rocket killed two Israeli-Arab shepherds in Kibbutz Nachal Oz. This incident was at first falsly reported as being a loose IDF shell that exploded. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.

That's not counting other attacks in which no one was hurt. Can we really say that there is no terror coming from the Gaza Strip?

YNet quotes Halutz:

Nine months after the Gaza disengagement, can you say what this maneuver has done to the Palestinian terrorist organizations?

"There is no one truth here. I look at the disengagement and ask whether it strengthened the Israeli stance. In pure military terms, no soldier or civilian has been killed in Gaza. One hundred terrorists were killed and Qassams have fallen, these are the facts. Regarding the Qassams, we are acting and we will reach a solution. I'm not putting a schedule on it. I would be glad to say that on this date or other it will happen, but we do what we can in order to deal with the rockets."

In other words, we have no solution. All we know is that we are not willing to try the one thing that has a chance of working - re-liberating Gaza (or at least returning the IDF to Gaza) because the potential casualty cost is too high and the public would throw the government out if it admitted that the whole 'disengagement' was a 'mistake.' Note that he does not say that the 'disengagement' strengthened the Israeli stance. It clearly did not. The words "in Gaza" are meaningless because there are no Jews in Gaza now. And if the 'Palestinians' keep shooting Kassams at Israeli civilian installations, eventually one is bound to hit R"L. Are we more secure? I think not. If anything, we are less secure. If you talk to him in private off the record, Dan Halutz might even admit it.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:42 PM